David Frum has a great article up today at the National Post about the two paths that the GOP could take in the wake of Tuesday’s results:
The first choice is the choice on display at the excited rallies that cheered Sarah Palin all through the fall. This is a choice to fall back on the core base of the Republican party. The base is almost entirely white, almost entirely resident in the middle of the country, moderately affluent, middle-aged and older, more male than female, with some college education but not a college degree. Think of Joe the Plumber and you see the core of the Republican party.
As Frum notes, Republicans have won many elections thanks to Joe the Plumber and his father, the Reagan Democrat. The problem that the 2008 Election lays bare, though, is that appealing to just Joe and his Dad isn’t going to win elections on a national level any more, and Patrick Ruffini explains why:
People have been focusing on whether the youth vote was up. It was — slightly: going from 17 to 18 percent. But the real story about the youth vote is not how many “new” voters Obama got to show up. It’s how he produced a gargantuan 25% swing among existing young voters, or those who were sure to vote for the first time anyway.
How big?
18 percent times a 25 percent increase in the Democratic margin equals 4.5 points, or a majority of Obama’s popular vote margin. Had the Democratic 18-29 vote stayed the same as 2004’s already impressive percentage, Obama would have won by about 2 points, and would not have won 73 electoral votes from Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, or Indiana.
So, to clarify here: Obama’s youth margin = 73 electoral votes. Without the economic crisis, this would have been the difference.
In the House, the youth margin for Democratic candidates was up 18 points from 2004 and 7 points from 2006 (with a 50% increase in the voter pool from ‘06). The 18-29 demographic’s net contribution to Democratic margins in the House went from 12% x 22% = 2.64% in 2006, to 18% x 29% = 5.22% in 2008. How many of our guys lost by 2.6% or less? And it wasn’t about “more” or “new” young voters. For the most part it was the same young voters, who were conditioned to vote for Democratic candidates after switching to Obama.
(…)
This is not to say that a white male (or female) Democratic candidate would not have won the election. The youth and African American figures would have moved some, though not as strongly for them, and if it was Hillary, you’d have seen a similar phenomenon with women voters. So, simply transposing 2004 figures onto 2008 isn’t the right baseline. But this is a dramatic statement nonetheless. Obama has reshaped the electorate. And it’s been only partially through new voter registration. He has gobbled up every last, existing young voter and African American
A stark truth when you think about. There’s an entire generation of voters out there, a generation that is going to be voting for a long time and has become politically engaged by a charismatic young President, that is being conditioned to vote Democratic, and they don’t see anything attractive in the GOP.
And that leads right to the second path that Frum talks about:
A generation ago, Republicans dominated among college graduates. In 1984 and 1988, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won states like California, Pennsylvania and Connecticut – states that have been “blue” for a generation. (America’s least educated state, West Virginia, went for Michael Dukakis in 1988.)
Those days are long gone. Since 1988, Democrats have become more conservative on economics – and Republicans have become more conservative on social issues.
College-educated Americans have come to believe that their money is safe with Democrats – but that their values are under threat from Republicans. And there are more and more of these college-educated Americans all the time.
You can hardly blame them for coming to this conclusion.
For the past eight years, they’ve lived under a nominally Republican President who has governed more like a free-spending Democrat than a fiscally conservative Republican and who has failed to even once use his veto spend to stop Congress from reaching into the public purse. Before that, they lived under a Republican-controlled Congress that, to the outside observer, seemed more interested in the President’s sex life than in advancing an agenda of limited government and economic freedom. They saw a Republican run for President talking about what a bad idea Bill Clinton’s policy of “nation building” in the Balkans was, only to see him turn around and try to build a democratic nation in a desert nation that had no experience with democratic politics.
As D.J. McGuire notes, young voters today have almost no experience of a Republican Party that does anything other than pay lip service to its limited government rhetoric:
The last time the Republican Party stuck its neck out and went “to the mattresses” on limited government was the “government shutdown” of 1995. Say what you will about it, the party establishment has been spooked ever since. Thus Gingrich et al rolled over to Clinton’s spendthrift demands in 1998 and hoped Monica Lewinsky would rescue them (she didn’t). George W. Bush ran on “compassionate conservatism” and caught a break when Al Gore’s voters concentrated themselves too heavily in the northeast; then he (Bush) ran for re-election on national security issues, and won. We all remember 2006 and last Tuesday.
So, the last time the Republican Party actually tried to reduce the size of government, the oldest young voter in America today was sixteen. Now, I followed politics at that age, but I was a geek. Most American teenagers aren’t. In other words, no young American voter has ever seen the Republicans try to reduce the size and scope of government.
So, for them, this election was a contest between a big-government party with the charismatic mixed-race nominee with his better-than-any-comedian-on-earth running mate and a big-government party with a cantankerous old guy with the folksy Alaskan.
Are we really surprised who won?
No, and we shouldn’t be.
